Thursday, October 18, 2012

One of my favorite things to teach in math is fractions. There's so much you can do to teach this and my kids have always done well with this difficult skill. Yesterday we learned about halves and we did my cookie activity from last year

Today we covered fourths and we used the story The Little Red Hen Makes a Pizza

We each made a little red hen and a pizza. Once we finished the pizza, we folded it into fourths and drew lines to show the four equal pieces. They LOVED this activity and it helped so much! If you want the patterns, I can fix it up into a little freebie...just let me know!

***If you have commented or emailed me about the Reading Street Comprehension Sheets....I *promise* I am going to upload them! I've been so backed up with units that I haven't finalized them yet. They will be up this weekend! Sorry for the delay!

Sunday, October 7, 2012

It's almost Halloween time! :) I *love* Halloween. I think it's such a fun time of year and there's so much you can do in the classroom. I meant to upload my Halloween centers earlier, but they are finally in my TpT store. Check them out by clicking here!

Want to snag a free copy? Head over to our facebook page to find out how!

Saturday, October 6, 2012

It's safe to say at this point, all weeks are super busy. I meant blog earlier in the week, but of course I didn't. Which leads to the really random title of this post. Here's some classroom happenings from the past week.

This activity was one we did several weeks ago, but I've never shared. We read one of my favorite stories, A Pet for Petunia. This fits in perfectly for the pet unit in Reading Street. We made skunks and brainstorm animals that would make good pets. Skunks didn't make the cut of course.

We have been having a ball with our first author study: Mo Williems. I always start author studies on Mo Williems because the books are easy to read and always a class favorite. Mo makes reading fun!

We talked about character traits

I also introduced the comprehension skill, Plot, using Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus.

Please disregard the mistake at the bottom. It has since been fixed :)

We made our own pigeons to go with the plot activity.

Do you have an iPad in your classroom? We are lucky enough to have one and I downloaded the best app to go with our Mo Williems author study. It's called Don't Let the Pigeon Run this App. It's a little expensive but so neat! Mo teaches you how to draw the pigeon and you can record your own voice to use in a story! I used the app whole group to learn how to draw the pigeon by putting it under the Elmo. It worked great!

I ran up to school this morning to decorate for Halloween, among other things. I love, love, love Halloween. It's my favorite holiday!

And lastly we have been busy learning so much! Is anyone else struggling with rhyming?? This is always something I feel like my kids struggle with so I made a chart to help with this and some centers that I will share later.